jQuery Book Coming Soon

For those of you who have been following the jQuery blog the past couple months, you may have noticed John Resig’s mention of a secret: “There’s a jQuery book in the works!” Well, I am thrilled to be able to leak a little more information about that secret.

For the past few months my friend Jonathan Chaffer and I have been hard at work on the book, and everything is progressing well. Our writing is being supported by a stellar group of technical reviewers, some of whom are members of the jQuery development team. We’ll be able to divulge details about the book’s contents soon. The publisher is readying a web page for it, so as soon as that is completed, we can give you the full scoop.

About the Authors

Jonathan Chaffer is a long-time Drupal contributor and creator of Drupal’s CCK. He also likes to make up bizarre band names and album titles, based on snippets of conversations he overhears, at Tweak the Viking. Karl Swedberg (that’s me) is a jQuery zealot who runs the Learning jQuery blog and still tries to keep a bit of his former career as an English teacher alive at his other blog, English Rules. Jonathan and Karl work together at Structure Interactive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where they have been given a lot of freedom to use jQuery, as well as standards-based, semantic HTML & CSS, in many of their projects.

Wow, so many questions! I really wish I could answer all of them. When the publisher gets the page up on their site, I’ll post a link to it from here. They control pricing, publication date, etc., and they’ve asked me kindly not to point people to their site until they are ready with a page that features the book. I hope the PDF version will be made available earlier, but I don’t know what their plans are for releasing it.

Eddie, we’re covering jQuery 1.1, with an occasional reference to 1.0. We’re trying to keep tabs on all the great changes taking place in the jQuery source so that the book will be fresh and relevant when it’s published. I understand that this type of thing can be difficult when writing about software that is undergoing frequent revisions, but we’re keeping almost daily contact with John Resig and others on the dev team (and having some of them review the book) so that readers can be assured of up-to-date information as of print time.

As jQuery is such a powerful DOM selector, there are many possibilities to select an element. I would like to see some discussion about how expensive each method is and the best practice for coding it.

As you can see below, it’s possible to get varying results depending how you code it.